"They don't sell pink plasters. Only dark brown ones." Shania shrugged.
My eyes widened at that. I'd never really thought about it before, but she was right. I'd never seen any pink plasters. Plasters were the colour of us Crosses, not the noughts.
[from Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman. To ease any confusion about plaster colours, in her novel the white people (the noughts) are treated as inferior to the black people (the Crosses). The small "n" and capital "C" are deliberate.]
The quotation. That's the nature of privilege. Expressed through something small but real and expressed still on the shelves of Superdrug and Tesco.
You usually don't even notice it until made to see it. You have been taught, perhaps unintentionally, not to see.
I confess I'm the same as anyone else. I too didn't think about plasters until someone mentioned them some years ago. I didn't think about things described as "skin tone" and only coming in my kind of shade.
I wasn't a racist but ... ! No, that's not right. These days I hate racism just as I always did but put my hand up and due to sleepwalking through society, as most people do, I see the racism inherent in my life, by what I don't mean to say and do and by the way I'm treated. To collaborate with systemic prejudice is to be complicit. I confess too that I still have much to learn.
If you doubt that, you could do worse than read "I, Racist", a congregational reflection given to a congregation at an all white church in the USA. I highly recommend it and it's much shorter than a book! I was introduced to it by a black man who came along, once, to a philosophy group I used to attend. It's unsurprising he didn't return. He talked of the "sermon" and what it said. I promised I'd read it - and I did although it took me months to get round to it. Every other person in the group, all white, said they didn't need to read it because they knew they weren't racist so there wasn't any point. The fact that he as a black man would be treated differently to anyone in that group was dismissed as not worth talking about. Like I say, it's unsurprising he didn't return.
The first time I thought about skin tone make up for black people was a revelation. I was left wondering how I had never thought of it for myself when it's so glaringly obvious that a pink "skin tone" concealer doesn't work for everyone.
That's privilege. To be trained up unconsciously not to see that you have it.
It's not that you're overtly committing evil, you just covertly and without consideration participate in a society that does.
Awakening from that slumber hurts. But not as much as being on the receiving end, to be the one experiencing direct attacks and micro-aggressions.
Having gone from living, while hiding and hating myself, as a heterosexual cisgender homophobic Christian man to living free and openly as myself, a lesbian, and putting that faith behind me, there are a few areas of privilege I've experienced from both sides.
There's a lot I didn't think about for much of my life. I don't condemn myself for that. It's just how it was because that's just the way things are. And the way things are does not need to continue. Things can be changed and we can all be taught to think and see how hurt and privilege are perpetuated by the blindness of our hearts and minds.
It applies to other types of prejudice too. Ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia. All of them and more.
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